


Denial

by Lapsed_Scholar



Series: Season 9 Rewrites and Musings [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: (at least a little), (with Mulder), Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, Episode: s04e23 Demons, Episode: s08e15 DeadAlive, Episode: s09e11 Audrey Pauley, F/M, He's mostly just attractive support for Scully here, Introspection, Moral Dilemmas, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 09, he's good at it though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 21:45:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16605995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsed_Scholar/pseuds/Lapsed_Scholar
Summary: If anyone can explain the unexplainable, it’s Dana Scully.Doggett, Scully, Mulder, Reyes, and the rejection of reality.





	Denial

**Author's Note:**

> Scully's thought processes during "Audrey Pauley."
> 
> I do not mean to impugn the actual hospital in Falls Church; I just named this one after the real one for the sake of verisimilitude.

_Inova Fairfax Hospital_  
_Falls Church, VA_  
_January 12, 2002_

John Doggett has been in hospitals before. He’s witnessed people dying. He’s lost people close to him (lost his _son_ ). He’s never considered himself divorced from reality, unwilling to accept hard truths or intensely personal pain.

God knows, he’s had his share of that.

But Monica’s not gone. He knows it, _knows it_ : deep in his bones, on an instinctual level, in a way he can’t manage to explain.  His inability to explain is becoming more and more of a problem as the hospital gets more and more intent on pulling the plug, eager to carve her up. They’ve already planned how she’s going to be allocated, for God’s sake. (John is an organ donor, himself; he’s experienced too much not to be. But Monica is still _using_ her organs, dammit.)

He’s no fool. He registers how he must look: deranged and grasping at straws. Monica’s still in there, though, and he won’t give up on her. Why is everyone so quick to give up on her? Monica deserves better than that; she doesn’t give up on people. She’s never given up on him.

_“I don’t see you ever disappointing anyone, John.”_

Goddammit.

Right now, he’s standing on the opposite side of a sterile hospital corridor from Dana Scully where they’ve paused to confer on this nightmare that has so abruptly consumed an ordinary Saturday. Dana is watching him with careful eyes. She listens to his arguments, counters them patiently with perfectly rational, reasoned explanations. Her sanity is driving him crazy.

He does recognize the role reversal from their yearlong partnership. Even with his current, frantic preoccupation, it’s hard to miss. Back then, she had been desperate and grasping blindly at the unknown, theorizing into a formless void. He’d been the sane one: looking always for evidence and remaining stolid and grounded in the perceivable world.

Well, he still _is_ rooted in the facts of the world, dammit. He holds fast to the one fact of this case that he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt. Monica is alive. He may not fully understand it. He knows now that he’ll never be able to understand everything that he’s seen. All he can do is accept the facts, orient himself accordingly, and act.

It’s not that Dana doesn’t care. She looks worried and deeply sad, and he can tell that she’s straining to balance her own scientific, medical training against her loyalty to him and to Monica. And, at least for now, she’s willing to listen to him and to help him investigate. To search for proof. He’s grateful. If anyone can explain the unexplainable, it’s Dana Scully.

* * *

Dana Scully is deeply unsettled.

The trill of the phone nudged her awake before dawn that cold Saturday morning, but she hadn’t suspected anything was amiss until the serious timbre of Mulder’s hushed voice penetrated her fuzzy consciousness. Her trepidation grew with her awareness, and when she finally roused enough to turn and look at him, the solemn, pained look on his face caused dread to settle heavily in her stomach with a lurch that brought her fully awake.

And thus was she summoned from her cozy bed to attend the dying of Monica Reyes. A sudden, unpredictable car accident—one of the random, senseless sorrows of life. Mulder, still sleepy and warm and bare-chested, helped her into her coat. She leaned for a moment against him, absorbing his warmth and composing her mind, preparing for the grave responsibility to which she was now called. She wasn’t sure if she was going as a friend, a representative of the FBI, a physician, or a witness (to the truth, before God).

By the time Scully had arrived at the hospital, Monica was brain dead. The EEG was flat; there were no medical signs of life.

John adamantly refused to believe it.

Monica had been conscious at the accident scene, he argued. And so she had been. She didn’t look very badly injured; her injuries weren’t enough to result in death, he insisted. And so the _external_ injuries appeared.

But catastrophic injuries don’t always look externally dramatic, and traumatic brain injury is often characterized by a delayed onset of symptoms. A patient can be alert, talking, and moving while the damage is insidiously building. Brains are complicated and difficult to understand, even on the cutting edge of medical science. The ultimate course of TBI is dangerously hard to predict.

(It disturbs her deeply that this had happened to Monica in a hospital. Where they should’ve been watching for it—on standby to prevent it—they had her on an EEG for fuck’s sake.)

~

_The task force has the suspect subdued; she can hear the local sheriff beginning to read him his rights. As soon as the scene is secure, she turns around, heads briskly back to where her partner had been knocked to the ground._

_He’s sitting up, shaking his head and blinking and moving his jaw around a little. He gives her a rueful look when he hears her approach._

_“Damn. There goes my chance to impress you with my consummate physical prowess.”_

_She squats down and studies his face, examines his eyes. Hers are not unkind.  “Hm. You’ll have to settle for singular mental agility.” She runs her fingers very lightly around on his head until he bats her away._

_“I’m OK, Scully. Just gimme a minute.” He appears to believe that he means this, and she’s briefly impressed by the peculiar mix of toughness and vulnerability in her new partner._

_“That was a hard blow to the head you took, Mulder. You need to go to the hospital so they can check you out.”_

_“Maybe you can just check me out right here.” He lifts his eyebrows in invitation, but she just narrows her eyes at him._

_He frowns. “It was just a little bump. I’ve had worse. I’ll be fine.”_

_She frowns back. “They need to check you for subdural hematoma—internal bleeding that puts pressure on the brain. You might feel OK now, but with the force of that impact, we don’t want to take any chances.”_

_The argument goes back and forth until she threatens to call an ambulance unless he permits her to drive him. He pouts the entire way there and slumps sullenly in the examination room. She sits calmly beside him and remains firmly unmoved._

_“Why’re you still here, anyway? You win, all right? You don’t have to watch them scan me to make sure I don’t escape.”_

_“You shouldn’t be alone.” It’s a true statement. He’ll need a ride home, for one thing. And even assuming the scan’s clear and he’s released, he should still have someone nearby to keep an eye on him for the next twenty-four hours. And... well... It’s a true statement._

_“Hmph,” he mumbles, but an emotion she can’t quite identify flickers across his eyes before he looks away from her and down at the floor again._

_~_

She hadn’t really expected this of John Doggett.

Putting aside their rocky start, when he had deliberately antagonized her to test a theory, John had always been quietly sympathetic to her devotion to her missing partner. He hadn’t shared her beliefs or her convictions, but he had dedicated himself to finding Mulder and to carrying on the work of the X-Files. He had remained, however, ever practical and firmly grounded in experiential reality. He adapted to new circumstances as they were presented, as strange as those circumstances may be, but he was not prone to flights of fancy.

Monica was the mystic.

Scully is trying to be responsible, trying to respect both Monica and her wishes. Monica’s living will is clear, and she feels that honoring it is a duty that verges on sacred. But John’s conviction is so strong that Monica isn’t dead, that she’s being murdered. He doesn’t have solid evidence yet, but Scully is deeply aware that she didn’t always have solid evidence, either, during their brief partnership.

She owes John Doggett. She is deeply indebted to him in a way she will never be able to repay. Assisting him now is the least she can do. She can listen to his suspicions, help him investigate, analyze the medical evidence. She can do that for now, at least.

(What does she owe Monica Reyes? Do those debts lead to the same actions, or ones diametrically opposed?)

~

_She’s staring at rows and rows of test results and cultures, wracking her brain for anything at all that she may have once known about the black oil and then forgotten. She’s close to a workable theory, so close to a solid treatment regimen, and she can’t stop now. She doesn’t have the luxury of time._

_Doggett brings her a mug of herbal tea. “Job like this normally calls for coffee, but I figured this’d be better than nothin’.”_

_She’s vaguely aware of physical discomfort. Her back hurts and her feet hurt. She can feel the physical reality of being pregnant, and she’s sure that she’ll be exhausted whenever she allows herself to be. She won’t allow herself to be. Not yet._

_She thanks Doggett for the tea and looks furiously over her results again. He’s clearly out of his element—dead men returning to life is hard enough for a scientist, but Doggett doesn’t have the science to fall back on. He’s trying to help, and he’s staying out of her way. She can tell that he still doesn’t believe or trust any of what’s been happening, but if he voices any of his doubts aloud, he’s saving them for Skinner. She’s grateful for that restraint._

_Later, when she’s done all that science can do for Mulder, she can only sit with him and wait and hope and pray. His body (miraculously warm and physically responsive once again) has to process the treatment, fight off the virus, rest. She runs her hands over his face, his arms, his chest. Smooths his hair. She can’t get enough of touching him, feeling the warmth of him, watching the rise and fall of his chest, free from the ventilator. She brushes over the physical scarring on his body—scars that have improbably formed and partially healed since she last saw him (when she’d thought it the last she’d ever see him)._

_She remembers (she thinks she remembers) after her own abduction. She had also been returned mysteriously (though in far better physical shape), was also in a coma. Hallucinations or visions, she never truly decided which she believed. She thinks she can remember talking to her father and the feeling of drifting away. But she also remembers a presence that had anchored her, something that kept her tied to this plane of existence. Although her memories of that time are hazy, she’s always believed that presence to have been Mulder._

_She prays that he can sense her presence too, wherever he is. That he can feel her caresses, hear her gentle words, sense the depth of her love._

_He opens his eyes and wakes up, and he’s himself (his maddening self), and even though he’s barely lucid and weak and confused, it’s the most elated she’s ever been in her life. She unsuccessfully fights tears and presses herself into him, gets as close as she can and not caring, for the moment, about the physical changes in her body that he might be able to feel._

_Doggett looks in, checking on them just briefly. Mulder isn’t cognizant enough to register it, but she’s grateful. She’s beyond grateful to John Doggett for his support and his decency and his willingness to search and keep searching. Her temporary partner. He’s helped her recover her life. She’ll never be able to repay that debt._

~

She calls home because she needs a break from the existential, or maybe because she needs another opinion on it. She sits in the hospital cafeteria and leans her head against a window.

She asks Mulder for stories of William, and because they are who they are, he innately understands why she’s asking and indulges her thoroughly. She learns that William spent the morning crawling and trying to pull himself up on the coffee table. He’s still very interested in the stackable cups that her mother had brought him. He keeps trying to pull the wheels off the blue toy truck with the aim of putting them in his mouth, and he’s calling Mulder “Dada” (but he’s been calling everything “Dada,” including the toy truck and the stackable cups and his favorite book and the fish, whenever Mulder picks him up so that they can look at the fish, which is at least twice a day).

The conversational patterns of new parents: She and Mulder are ever telling each other enraptured stories about the slightest changes in their child’s perfectly ordinary behavioral patterns. They’re both extraordinarily intelligent people, and they both find this topic riveting.

“He’s been... kind of cuddly today, wants to sit in my lap, wants me to hold him for longer than usual. I don’t know, Scully, maybe he can tell.”

There’s a very slight hesitancy in his voice that accompanies the subtle pivot to the topic at the back of both of their minds. She knows Mulder well enough to suspect that he’s been an active participant in the cuddling, even as they’ve been working to help their son manage his separation anxiety. (All three of them struggle with separation anxiety to some degree, but whereas William’s had been triggered by his discovery of object permanence—that his parents still exist when they leave the room—his parents have been triggered by something rather opposite of that—the fear that a loved one will vanish in their absence.)

She quells her reflexive skepticism that William is far too young to understand death and the moral dilemma before her now. Babies are so highly attuned to their parents that it’s entirely possible that William is able to sense his father’s sorrow.

“Maybe he can,” she murmurs. Then, “I wish I could.” She still isn’t sure if she wants to discuss this with Mulder; she’s worried that he’s not yet capable of withstanding musings on life and death and the shadowed place between.

“Scully?” gentle and quiet, and he sounds so much like himself in this moment that she wants to just forget the past two years ever happened and confide in him the way she used to. She still trusts him to know her. More than she trusts herself.

She closes her eyes and swallows hard. “Monica’s... brain dead, Mulder. The EEG is flat; I examined it myself, and I saw where it flatlined. But John... He’s not taking it well. He’s convinced that Monica’s still alive and her doctor’s trying to kill her. He’s running all over the hospital, pulling records, trying to prove it. And I’m trying to listen and to help him, but I just don’t see any proof. Not real proof; nothing solid. I mean, Dr. Preijster treats very sick people—it’s no wonder they die.” She stops, suddenly uncertain and confused.

Mulder is silent for such a long time that her anxiety for his well-being is beginning to spike again; she’s afraid that she’s made a mistake in asking this of him. But then he says, softly, “I don’t think you’d be telling me all this if you were sure she was dead, Scully.”

~

_She’d never known, before she met Fox Mulder, that a legitimate, serious response to “I will die of terminal cancer” is “No, you won’t.” He’s the only person she’s ever known who believes he can change reality if he only believes enough, tries enough, sacrifices enough, ~~loves enough~~. She’d think him a Catholic saint if he didn’t keep reminding her so vehemently of his one area of disbelief._

_She prays regularly to St. Jude on his behalf._

_She drives them home from Rhode Island; he’s pale and quiet in the passenger seat. He is as sick in appearance as she is in fact. His eyes are closed, and she thinks he’s fallen asleep, but then he sighs through his nose and speaks softly._

_“I’m sorry, Dana; god, I’m sorry.”_

_He really should be sorry, and her concern for him isn’t quite enough to make her forget it, so she just hums a little in acknowledgment._

_“I was... looking for answers; trying to understand... I thought that if only I could, then maybe I’d also find something for—well, it doesn’t matter. I never meant to drag you into it—didn’t mean to call you in the first place, but I guess my catatonic state had other ideas about self-preservation.”_

_She doesn’t ask him what it was that he was looking for so urgently. He wouldn’t give her a straight answer. They’ve both been pretending she isn’t sick. Just as they’ve both been pretending that they don’t mean nearly as much to each other as they do._

_She very carefully chooses not to wonder if the high personal risk of this procedure was an impediment to him, or if it was part of the appeal. It’s become abundantly clear that he’s quite willing to give his life in his attempts to save hers. And what will become of him once she dies, as she is almost guaranteed to do, in spite of anything he can do?_

_He’ll live a long and meaningful life, full of answers and beauty and truth. He’ll find people who care about him, though he’ll remember her frequently and fondly as a dear friend who loved him truly._

_(Her denial is just as strong as his.)_

~

A murdered nurse. A doctor with a disturbing pattern of dying patients.

Why the hell hadn’t she noticed it earlier? There were medical clues, even without John’s conviction (as unprovable as it was unshakable). Even without his suspicions about the supernatural insight of the young woman named Audrey Pauley.

She’d done her best to fulfill all her responsibilities on both sides of the argument, delaying making the ultimate choice until she could be sure. She helped John run down every lead he had: independently examined Monica and all her charts and tests, autopsied the dead nurse for evidence of foul play, and pulled all the medical records of Dr. Preijster’s patients over the indignant protests of the hospital administrator.

But she’d also assisted the transplant team, helped them prepare to work on her friend. She’d called Monica’s parents in Mexico City and summoned them to Virginia to say goodbye. (With the way everything turned out, Monica’s parents are simply going to be paying a visit to their living daughter. She suspects that any parent would gladly make that shift in plans.)

She had trusted John eventually, but what if she hadn’t? She almost hadn't.

In the end, though, it had still been there. Her rigorous conscience and curiosity. Whatever was in her that made her follow Mulder and test his theories. (It had saved him. It had saved her.)

(And here he is. Here she is. Still.)

But what if things had been different? What if?

If if if

She aches: feet, back, head. Heart.

She comes home to Mulder, wraps herself up in him: warmth, breath, beating heart, living metabolism. Presses as physically close to him as she can possibly get. Enfolds him in her, melding together until their boundaries blur.

**Author's Note:**

> I get that Scully was mostly playing a plot-driven role in this episode, but really? She has no qualms at all about declaring Reyes dead, over Doggett's objections? It seems like this scenario would hit very close to home for her.


End file.
